Issues and Stats
The following info is from World Vision:
When clean water is scarce, all aspects of life are impacted.
- Health: Contaminated water and poor sanitation are factors in 80 percent of all disease in the developing world.
- Food production: Without safe water, crops and livestock die and healthy meals cannot be prepared.
- Economics: Poor health from unclean water means the productivity of the community suffers and family incomes dwindle.
- Education: Where water is scarce, it is unlikely that schools will even be built or teachers will move to the communities. And because children spend time fetching water, they cannot attend school.
Here are some more stats from World Vision
- Every 21 seconds, a child dies from a water-related illness.
- More than 2.7 billion people have inadequate or nonexistent access to proper sanitation.
- When a community gains access to clean water, its child mortality rate drops by half.
Water and the Millennium Development Goals
Access to clean water is an important part of the Millennium Development Goals, which targeted 8 issues to attack in hopes to cut poverty in half by 2015. These goals were signed onto by 189 different nations in 2000.
The seventh goal is to ensure environmental sustainability. Over one billion people across the world lack access to clean water and 2.6 billion do not have access to basic sanitation, deficits that are projected to widen with emerging threats such as climate change and population growth (www.one.org). This seventh goal is really what we are fighting towards with giving clean water. But, access to clean water also plays an integral part in ALL OF THE OTHER GOALS! They must be achieved together.
Unfortunately, currently, the goals are not being met as targeted. Take a look at the following statistics from Water Aid (www.wateraid.org).
- An extra US$10 billion each year is needed to reach the Millennium Development Goal target of halving the proportion of people without access to safe water and sanitation - about half of what rich countries spend on mineral water.
- To reach the water target will require the provision of services to an additional 300,000 people a day over the next decade, requiring current efforts to be stepped up by almost one third.
- To reach the sanitation target means providing services to an additional 450,000 people a day until 2015. This calls for almost a doubling of the current efforts. On current trends, the world will miss the sanitation target by more than half a billion people.
Staggering statistics, eh? These statistics are a big drive behind this project. Let's not leave these impoverished countries hanging.